90-second animated explainer about a new enzyme system

Prompt

The author shared part of the prompt.

Title: Lumi Reads the Haystack
Folder: create a new folder "lumi-reads-the-haystack" and work only inside it. Don't read, reuse or modify anything else in the parent folder. The one exception: copy the research paper into the new folder as reference/paper.pdf (I will point you to it) and read it fully before planning.
Mode: PLAN FIRST: propose the plan and timeline, then wait for my go.
Format: 16:9 1920×1080, 30 fps, about 64 s. Loops seamlessly: yes.
Goal: a high-quality short people want to share: vibrant, bold colours, a bit ridiculous and incredibly ambitious. It needs a "wow" in the first 2 seconds.
Premise (one sentence): A tiny glowing creature and a crew of its own copies dig through a haystack of 1.9 billion protein clusters, and after sorting machines, dead ends and self-made follow-up hunches, one of them finds a brand-new enzyme family by doing the rare thing: actually reading the raw DNA, letter by letter, and noticing a pattern repeat.
Hero: Lumi, an original creature about 14 cm tall. A soft, rounded bean-shaped body like a frosted-glass lantern in bright mint-teal, with a rim highlight and subsurface glow. Its face is a softly glowing display on the inside of the frosted front (big round eyes, tiny mouth), under oversized round gold-wire reading glasses. Two leaf-shaped ears on springs. Stubby arms with mitten hands, tiny feet. A round belly window holds a golden "notice-light" that is dim by default and blazes when Lumi spots a pattern (the film's stand-in for the model's internal repeat-signals). Curious, patient, a little nerdy: the one who reads the fine print. Crew variants use the same model with props: Worker (tiny hard hat, magnifier), Supervisor (clipboard, APPROVE and REVISE stamps), Curator (cardigan, index cards), Editor (red pen, visor). The hero is one specific Worker Lumi with a chip in its hard hat. Near-photoreal 3D, always moving and reacting.
Arc:
- Hook (0–2 s): extreme close-up on Lumi's glasses; reflected in the lenses is an impossibly endless glowing archive. Whip-pull back to reveal it for real, crates rising into the sky, as a counter slams onto screen: "1.9 BILLION protein clusters". Lumi gulps, glasses slide down its nose.
- Escalation: Lumi splits into a crew of copies, a ticket dispenser spits out tasks, a city-sized sorting machine funnels billions of crates down to a handful of candidates (counters ticking), follow-up tickets sprout into a giant branching tree, and the hero chases a promising lead that turns out to be a red herring. The Supervisor stamps REVISE and hands over a new ticket: "check the DNA upstream".
- Turn: the hero pulls a raw DNA ribbon out of a crate. No scanner, no labels. It pushes up its glasses and starts reading, step by step along the letters. The motif appears once (notice-light flickers), again (brighter), and by the third copy the light blazes and holds. It steps back and all 14 copies ignite along the ribbon like fairy lights. Then it freezes: "actually

Category

Explainers

Opus effort

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